Suicidal subjects: translation and the emotional foundations of Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexology

Attention to translation between languages can offer glimpses at the elusive evidence of past emotions and the circumstance in which they are formed. This uses a translation framework to examines the writings on homosexual death and suicide by the Jewish sexologist and homosexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935). It is prompted by the realization that while we know of many queer lives which have ended tragically as a result of legal persecution, violent attack or the inability to cope with heteronormative social and emotional pressures, we know surprisingly little about the traumatic impact of these deaths on the lives of their contemporaries and the shaping of modern queer culture more broadly. By paying attention to Hirschfeld’s writings in German and English on homosexual suicide, its causes and its reception, this chapter shows that lesbian and homosexual suffering caused emotional shockwaves that rippled far across the geopolitical boundaries of the modern world.